Sunday, March 25, 2012

Being Alive

I shut my eyes, let my breathe play through my body, following its path through my mind’s eye as it cruises from one extremity to another, filling up my cells with oxygen...

My limbs are stuck in awkward pantomime, I am frozen, can’t move, if I do, I will fall, if I don’t, I will fall

My legs are gone, they feel nothing, the tip of my toes which bear my entire weight and keeps me from plunging have numbed beyond existence

What’s keeping me stuck to this sheer wall of white, I wonder. I know this won’t last for long, nothing lasts for long

I look at my arms, thoroughly pumped, holding on to the pair of steel shafts, bent like banana, which are beginning to tremble and shake, I know their two tips, buried less than few mm into the rock hard ice is all that stands between me and certain death

The breeze plays with my hair, the cold refuses to warm my freezing mind, the body is beyond any feeling, yet my mind is alive... and I know very soon I would witness my own descent into hell, falling, crashing, splintering every bone of my body like a rag doll... all I need to do is let go and roll, and then I begin to see my knees and elbows flutter like dry leaves in tempest

I am only seconds away from ripping off, I feel my body leaning out and hastening the inevitable, I will my arms to let go of the axes, my toes to kick one last desperate time, I stare through between my knees at the ground far below now disappearing through the icy mist that rushes up with the wind

I am soloing, no one is holding a rope at the other end, no one will stop my fall, no one knows where I am, even I don’t

Then my body begins to shudder out of exhaustion, out of sheer proximity to death, am I scared, I can’t tell, my mind has stopped responding to such stimulus, my adrenalin must have frozen too

I take a final look at the mountains, at my friends and families, at the incredibly beautiful world that has nurtured me so long, at the distant blue horizons and at the frozen walls that have been my home all my life, very soon I will part from them forever and they would remain mute observers, will they smile, will they miss me, I don’t know, who knows, who will or can ever know

Only this moment is mine and I want to share it with my loved ones so I look at them and smile, and laugh, I feel an amazing sense of exhilaration, perched at the very edge of an endless void I am eager to leap and find out how far will I fall, I feel empty, I feel weightless, I feel like a bird about to fly

I am the breeze, I am the mountain, I am the sky, I am the endless white panorama around me and I begin to uproot, I watch my hands crash off and let go of the leash, I hear my ice axes pop out one by one from the ice, I lean out and let go

As I catapult away from the slope I finally feel what I have wanted to experience all my life

5 comments:

You surpassed your writing today, my friend... even after reading it at least 5 times, my heart still misses a beat! It feels as if its straight out of a hollywood thriller! LOL. Now, i also wonder why does death make you feel finally alive? Wish we all had the guts to embrace death the way you do!

Gorgeous. The feeling you describe at the end reminds me of my hang gliding days. Standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down, then carrying merely a few kg of delta wing, the rush of adrenaline, running towards the ravine, suddenly the ground has left my feet, then this feeling - I am one with the wind, the quiet, alone with the birds, in freedom. This was decades ago. I have to do it again!Thanks for reminding me of these long forgotten memories.

About Me

As a child, i had three wishes: to be a submariner (i did), to be a published author (i did, but won't rest till the Nobel and Booker rest on my mantle) and to be a mountaineer (still trying to fulfill this one).I am otherwise a globe trotting thrill seeker and have climbed the seven summits and skied to both the poles and then some.

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BLOG FOR CLIMBING AND IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

There is a drama and beauty to be found in the world’s most hard to reach places that far exceed the intensity we experience in our normal everyday lives. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from the fact that this pure happiness is usually only achieved after suffering some great hardships. In this mechanistic modern world, our primordial instincts for survival are often left untested, driving us to seek out those places where life is still hard.